


show me family, all the blood that i will bleed

by chocolatebirdie



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Angst, everyone else is mentioned but this is just clary, idk my dudes clary's just been thru a lot, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 22:15:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10228688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatebirdie/pseuds/chocolatebirdie
Summary: Clary learns that Jace isn't her brother, and she finds herself feeling lost and alone all over again.[A thinkpiece on one Clary Fray.]





	

**Author's Note:**

> fair warning: no dialogue, no setting, no real plot at all ?? literally just a peak inside clary's brain
> 
> i never thought clary introspection would be my first shadowhunters fic, but this just came to me and i couldn't let it go. i love this silly little show and all their amazing complex characters so much

_"I'm not your brother."_

The words played through Clary's mind on a loop, no other thought able to assemble coherently. Jace was not her brother. He wasn't anything, really. An almost-lover. A friend. What weight did that hold? What did that mean to him, when he had siblings? A parabatai? Parents, in the most important sense of the term, who loved him? What did she matter in the face of all that?

For what felt like the millionth time, she longed for her mother. From the moment she first saw a demon she'd felt like everything around her was a carousel that never stopped turning. She never got the chance to ask her the hundreds of questions that had run through her head in the last few months. All she wanted now was to ask about her brother - who the hell was he? What really happened to him? Why couldn't she recognize that Jace wasn't him?

If her mother were still here, Clary might be able to think. Process. Not make idiotic decisions that lead to a near impregnation and decimation of the entire downworld. She knew she was largely at fault. She knew that Magnus wouldn't have denied her her greatest wish without reason. And, in hindsight, she knew that Alec - who had never liked and barely tolerated her - had to have gone with her to appease her, to atone for his guilt in some way. But at the time none of that had mattered. All she'd wanted was clarity. All she'd wanted was her mom.

And when that failed, she clung to what she could. Simon. Luke. The two men who loved her mother almost as much as she did. The two men who knew her before all this. The two men who, for better or worse, would always be by her side. At the Institute, Clary always felt on edge. Unworthy. Even with Jace and Izzy, she was frequently reminded that she was an outsider; untrained, uneducated. The need to prove herself was constantly thrumming through her veins. But Simon had never needed her to prove anything to him, and Luke was more of a father to her than Clary had probably ever really acknowledged.

She shouldn't discredit their significance in her life, but at the same time, they had a bond she could never understand. She wasn't a downworlder. Simon was finding his place in the downworld, forging his own relationships with Raphael, Magnus, and Maia. Luke was the alpha of his pack and a leader that anyone would be lucky to follow. But she did not belong there.

An uncomfortable pang knotted in her stomach when she reminded herself that it was her fault Simon was in this world in the first place. It was her own father who had turned on his parabatai and almost killed him; who'd been responsible for his transformation to a downworlder and the outcasting from shadowhunters, including his own family. Neither of them deserved the pain they had endured, or the internal struggle with other downworlders they faced because of their relationship with her.

Jace would call her naïve, but she just didn't understand. Maybe she never would. She supposed she was better off for being raised without those prejudices - all though the circumstances behind that fact still made her flush red, anger curling from her fingertips to her toes - but it just left her feeling lost. All she wanted was someone, anyone who could genuinely understand where she was coming from. Someone who could look at her as more than a collection of mistakes, more than a product of a tyrannical enemy, more than a child who was perpetually a step behind. With each passing day, she was beginning to realize that that someone was not going to appear, because while magic may be real, miracles were not.

**Author's Note:**

> peep the grey's reference :-)
> 
> sorry this is like, not really uplifting at all whoops


End file.
